My Love Affair with Synology

If you look at Figure 5, you'll see that I have a static route set up
so that traffic going to the IP address of my VPN goes through my LAN's
gateway. Since it's only a static route for that network, the rest of
the internet is still inaccessible. I also could do fancy firewall work
and allow the NAS to access only the VPN and drop all other packets,
but I like the solution to be self-contained. That way, if I change routers
or router configs, I don't have to worry about getting DMCA notices.

Figure 5. This is the sneaky static route so I can connect to my VPN, but
nothing else.

The Synology also will act as a router, forwarding traffic. That means
I can point my Roku to the Synology as its gateway device, and I'm able
to watch local blackout games on the MLB.tv app, because all the traffic
goes through the VPN. The only change I have to make is on my DHCP server,
which gives the Synology's IP address as the Roku's gateway address. It
works perfectly and saves me setting up another VPN to get around MLB's
regional restrictions. (Honestly, I usually watch baseball games on TiVo,
but occasionally the game is on only via streaming, and I like having
that option.)

Backups

Remember when I said RAID wasn't a backup? Yeah, I meant that. I've lost
too much valuable data through the years to depend on RAID to protect my
files—even when the drives and NAS device seem to be more solid than
any I've had in the past. Thankfully, Synology has a few different backup
options (Figure 6). The most practical one for large amounts of data is
the Hyper Backup app. It has the ability to copy your entire NAS to
a variety of destinations. Whether you choose to buy another Synology
NAS and store it in your shed or back up your data to Amazon Glacier,
the same Hyper Backup program can handle the regular updates.

Figure 6. Backup solutions are in great supply.

I don't want to pay for Amazon Storage, even though the Amazon Drive
Unlimited is decently priced at $60/year. I worry that my 30TB would
cause Amazon to invent a reason to suspend my account. Plus, it would
take so long to back up my entire data store to the cloud, that it
literally might never get done. Right now, I just back up my irreplaceable files
(home movies, photos and so on). Someday I hope to get a second Synology NAS
and set up that "mirror in the shed". Still, Synology has so many backup
options, it's hard to find a reason to delay setting up a backup solution!

Things I Don't Do

The Synology had a decent processor, and the RAM is even
upgradeable. Still, it's not a beefy server when it comes to resource-hungry applications. For example, even though the Plex Media Server is
available in the package management system, I'd never install it. Plex
uses way too much CPU to transcode video streams. I'm thankful the
Synology is powerful enough to stream the actual video files over
fileshares, but the thought of transcoding 1080p MKV streams in real
time? It's a bad idea. I have a standalone server I use for Plex Media Server,
and while it can transcode at least four full resolution video streams,
it's also a huge i7 CPU with a boatload of RAM. Unless you're doing
minimal streaming with low-resolution video, I encourage you to avoid
Plex Media Server on any NAS device.

I also can't run the really amazing reverse proxy server on Synology. The
setup is easy, and the configuration is very intuitive, but my VPN/no-gateway setup means that the reverse proxy doesn't work outside my
network. Even if I forward a port to the NAS from my router, it tries to
send responses out the VPN connection and fails. Reverse proxies are
easy enough to configure on any other machine in my network, so it's
not a huge loss, but it's worth noting that it's something my crazy
VPN system breaks.

Not the Only Option

Before you think I was paid by the folks at Synology to brag about
their product, I will freely admit that a big tower server with a bunch
of hard drives and software RAID makes for an incredible NAS. It means
you can beef up the hardware too and do things like run Plex Media
Server. I simply like the efficiency of the Synology devices. They're fast,
cool running and just sip electricity. I'm sure there are other brands of
NASes that do a decent job too, and Synology isn't perfect. In all honesty,
however, it's the best product I've been able to find, and I have literal
piles of junk NAS devices that just couldn't do the job. If you're
looking for a NAS device, in my opinion, you can't go wrong with Synology.

Shawn is Associate Editor here at Linux Journal, and has been around Linux since the beginning. He has a passion for open source, and he loves to teach. He also drinks too much coffee, which often shows in his writing.